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Hollande and the Dutchman, Willy Wonka and the Wily Winker.

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Anna Raccoon on April 1, 2014

Elections are confusing times, locally we have been trying to make sure we know the difference between M. Castagner and M. Castanier. You have to listen closely – it makes the life or death difference between yet another car park being carved out of the verdant fields or the Banège river bank getting its triennial manicure….elsewhere the stakes are higher.

In industrial towns all over France, the traditional socialist party supporters, the men who do the filthy jobs, who work in furnaces, slurry pits, driving road trains across miles of unrelenting motor-way, and who have no further interest in politics than their current ‘place’ on the social housing list, or their ‘place’ in society as decent God fearing married men who support their families, have also been facing decisions.

They couldn’t care less what name the candidate goes by – they want to know what he stands for. Unfortunately for M. Hollande, he and his party have come to stand for ‘gay marriage’ and finding yourself further down the social housing list on account of unbridled immigration. Cameron must feel some sympathy for him this morning.

That those potential ‘socialist’ voters have been told that a) they are homophobic for not supporting gay marriage, a stance which they are told that despite the apparent millions of them marching in protest is an isolated one, and that in fact ‘the entire country’ – apart from them – is wholeheartedly in favour of, and then been told that they are racist for objecting to giving that nice new apartment in the banlieue to an asylum-seeker who arrived in France last week telling the authorities that an article they wrote in Outer Mongolia in 1965 about their homosexual leanings is now responsible for a credible threat to their life which will leave them unable to work for the next ten years – has left them in a filthy temper.

A filthy temper which nearly matches that last observed amongst the populace in 1789. If they could have taken M. Hollande’s head off they would cheerfully have done so – instead they have taken his legs off, and voted in massive numbers for the Front National.

Hollande might have escaped their anger, had he been able to admit that actually none of this was his doing – it was the work of the ‘Dutchman’, Herman Van Rompuy – who is of course Belgian, but French lorry drivers seems to prefer the association of Hollande and Holland, it amuses them when explaining French politics to English inquirers, and I have grown tired of pointing out their mistake. Belgian, Dutch, it is all the same to them. ‘Foreigners’ interfering in their life.

But what, I would oft enquire, would have been their reaction if Hollande had admitted that both the ‘free movement in the EU’ and ‘Gay marriage’ had been forced upon him by the EU, and were not his idea. ‘Then he shouldn’t be running the country’ is the inevitable response. Either way, Hollande could not win, as Cameron is finding out. Voters are incredibly attached to the idea of someone running the country who will look after their interests and not ‘every other fu*kers’.

The move to support UKIP in Britain is no different to the move to support the National Front – it is not a move from left to right, nor a move from right to left, nor a sign of racism or homophobia – it is a move that transcends those labels and looks to elect a party that will look after those here and now, not aspire to lofty ideals on behalf of minorities, many who have yet to arrive. It is primarily a shift in voting allegiance from those at the bottom of the pile, those with the toughest jobs, in the filthiest environments – and given that France has more immigrants, many fighting their way up from the bottom of said pile, than any other country, analysis will show eventually that many of those who have voted against uncontrolled immigration share a marked physical resemblance to the very people they are objecting to accommodating more of…

Over in the Ukraine, specifically Kiev, fresh elections are also pending. The choice is between Willy Wonka, Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire who made his money out of chocolate bars, and stepped into the vacuum left by perestroika to gain control of 5 Kanal, an ‘independent’ television channel that gained fame with its relentless criticism of Viktor Yanukovych, the duly elected president – and the Wily Winker, Yulia Tymoshenko, the re-fashioned billionaire ‘peasant’ who flutters her eyelashes at potential voters. Both ‘shenko’s’ made their billions out of Russian support for their commercial activities – both now seek to be seen as ‘the man on the clapham omnibus‘ who will free the working man from tyrannical Russian shackles by tying him to the European Union…

It doesn’t matter which of them the Ukrainian’s elect – they will be similarly disappointed when they discover that the new umbilical cord to the EU doesn’t just shovel money their way – it silently sucks far more back to finance ‘worthy’ projects of little interest to those at the bottom of the pile. It is planning to take 50% of Ukrainian pensions, and treble the price of energy supplies. The Ukrainian’s will be thrilled to discover that they are now supporting such worthy enterprises as the role of crustacean zooplankton on prokaryotic community composition in the mesopelagic ocean – it all helps to feed the kids and put a roof over your head, or at least it does – if you are a university educated, middle class, metro man with liberal instincts and an abiding interest in crustacean zooplankton.

I do wonder whether they will be as civilised and refined as French voters these days, when they discover that the man, or woman they have elected can no more make decisions in their favour than Hollande can – or will they just go straight for the ‘take off his head’ option?

Unless they can change the status-quo they can do very little, and the status-quo is controlled by the lawyers and their ‘uman Rights Internationalism. Hard to see the frogs being the first to jump, especially as Hollande already has ’em embroiled in more than one war just now.

It does seem grim Mainland member states (some) have seen economic collapse followed by unemployment and impoverishment on a huge scale over a short period of time. Their countries then ‘saved’ by even more loans from the same foreigners who now direct their national economies and selection of their political leaders. Massive movements of economic migrants now the norm. No, it’s not the aftermath of WW2, it’s the New European Order. And we’re about to vote for representatives to very expensively attend a powerless parliament in Brussels. Euros used instead of guns to obtain compliance. But then I’m prejudiced. Haven’t given up hope though.

That famous legal fictional character ; mid-to-late teens, hoody wearing, black, blessed with a ‘scrabble’ surname and ‘scrabble’ DNA ,with a stolen smart phone jammed to his ear and a can of Wife Beater in his paw sitting on the back row of the upper deck ?

If you read eureferendum.com regularly you can a better perspective on what is going on. On Farage, you have to say that here is a man who represents a party which espouses opinions, which at the very least a great deal of the British public have a lot of sympathy with, yet he has not been able to convert that into a single Parliamentary seat. Even the Green nutters have got that vile serpent of a woman, Caroline Lucas, elected. If you compare his performance with that of Marine Le Pen, she has had considerably more success in getting people elected. I’m afraid that’s because although he is a charismatic speaker, he’s no leader of a party, and runs the party as his own personal fiefdom. The aforementioned Greens won their seat because they identified an area where they would get a great deal of support and worked hard over a period of years to achieve it. Any competent UKIP leader could surely have done the same.

Here, as in France the media is massively on the side of the status quo. You regularly hear UKIP being described as a far right, extremist party on the BBC. Of course no one questions that the extremist might be the people who wish to hand over governance of their country to an unelected bunch of bureaucrats they can’t get rid of, as Tony Benn put it. I’m afraid the combination of an amateur bumbling UKIP leader, and a compliant media mean that progress is going to be slow.

There are plenty of very angry French people, the Bretons were getting quite agitated a while ago, and the middle class is gradually being squeezed. For example a decade ago many French people took a long holiday in the Summer, now an increasing number can’t afford a holiday at all. Many of them identify the introduction of the Euro as being the start of their problems, when prices were rounded up in the transition from the Franc, and it’s got progressively worse since then. But against that there are still a sizeable number of French people who are very Socialist in outlook, and they won’t turn around until they’re sent to concentration camps. The French authorities have been here before, and the French have nearly 300,000 armed state thugs, when you count the Gendarmerie, the three levels of Police force, and the Douanes, and they will, at gun point if necessary put down anything which gets too out of hand.

In our case being out of the Euro alters the arithmetic quite substantially. Firstly of course we can control our own economy to an extent no country in the Eurozone can, and perhaps more importantly when the next round of EU integration comes along, as it must to save the Eurozone, we might be left on the outside, in a second tier Europe. So the EU might leave us, rather than us leaving it.

But all of this will take time, and I’m preparing to die as a citizen of the EU, perhaps my children might taste freedom.

I personally believe that Nigel Flange is actually an EU mole, his role being to prevent an effective opposition forming. Although he did do quite well on’t telly the other day he has subsequently been undoing any good done. I fear that he and UKIP will crash & burn and the EUrophiles will have a clear run for a long while.

It is so frustrating – before the last UK election we were promised a hung parliament, and of course they lied. Not a single hanging.

I sympathise with your interpretation, not because I necessarily believe Nige is a stooge, though it is possible, but because I witnessed Bob Crow on the Isle of Wight ‘Vestas’ closure, and so know that such things do happen.

In the week of ‘protests’ by the RMT and its gang of student rent-a-mob, not one of those sixth-formers looked as though they could handle a tricycle, let alone a train, boat, or bus; it was clear to me that their Marxist tropes, such as: “The workers, united, will never be defeated!”, were designed to supplant the local people’s protests, who had a real vested interest in the jobs at risk. The upshot of Bob Crow’s squawking, shitting and flouncing off, was that the workers were divided, and promptly defeated.

‘UKIP being described as ….’. I think policy has now changed. Instead of fruitcakes, loonies, racists and BNP dropout labels, there’s now a softer more patronising approach- UKIP apparently attracts ill informed and less well off older disengaged ‘lower tier’ people still nostalgically attached to the 1950s. Bar room opinions rather than being with todays real world as seen by the elites. And who would want to be seen as a poor, out of touch old loser? Trouble is, when I look at some of the others… Getting the message across does of course depend on the credibility of the messenger.

Isn’t Francophone Belgium a bit like Francophone Canada – a foreign Department, and Flemish Belgium a part of Holland? This means that Herman the Foreigner’s mother tongue is (as far as the average Frenchman is concerned) DUTCH not Flemish.

Incidentally, am I the only person who thinks that “Walloon” sounds almost insulting?